Fri Feb 08, 2013 at 10:58:51 AM EST

Proponents say the expansion will allow more people access to better care, rather than relying on emergency rooms, but there is no guarantee of that with at least one study showing that a full 25 percent of doctors in the country no longer accept Medicaid patients because of low payment levels.

That means more crowded waiting rooms at the offices of the other doctors who will accept those patients whose bills are paid by others, or the patients can visit those same emergency rooms we're told they want to avoid.

These realities hardly give rise to confidence that the quality of care is going to improve for the nearly half million new qualifiers in Michigan. It begs an explanation of why we're so anxious to expand a federal program that has been widely criticized for providing inferior health care.

The other day, Teh Demas asked for a rebuttal to the idea that expanding Medicaid would mean health care for about half a million Michiganders who don't currently have it. This is it. Magic Frank says there's no reason to believe that having Medicaid is an improvement over having nothing, and that sending people away from emergency rooms to doctors' offices is a bad idea because it'll make things more crowded.

You get the feeling sometimes that Magic Frank knows absolutely nothing about the topic on which he's writing. Okay, not sometimes. More like, all the time.